Thursday, April 27, 2017

Fool Me Once by
Harlan Coben can be summed up in two words: Occam’s razor. This is
a good parable concerning the title, one we all know, especially the second
part. It is about the second part of that saying that this book addresses in
dramatic fashion. It probes the guilty conscience in a cunning way. It is a testament
to our military and to those who serve, survive, and carry the war with them
forever. This is a book only the reader can evaluate and no review can hope to
accomplish for another.

Monday, April 24, 2017

The Underworld by
Kevin Canty is about a town in Washington with a silver mine. Then there is a
mining accident and ninety-one men died. Ann and Jordan are surviving wives.
Ann is childless and Jordan has two small children. David survives his brother,
but his mom and dad don’t do so well. The survivors are known as the
“sleepwalkers” as they walk around with blank faces and a distracted look on
their faces as they continue conversations, one-sided conversations. As Ann
drives Jordan home after they have identified the bodies of their dead mining
husbands to the suits, Ann reflects, “It’s strange how everything looks new
today. She’s driven this road some uncountable number of times but today she
feels like a stranger here and she can see the strange lonely little houses
behind chain-link fences, the crumminess, fiberglass speedboats mildewing in
the side yards, firewood stacked under blue tarps. Why would anyone live here?
Years of smoke from the smelter have killed the trees. A tangle of weeds on the
hillsides now. Scraps of snow in the creases of the hills high above, though it
is spring in the valley, a season of mud and flowers. Half the cars look
abandoned. Dogs bark at passing cars. People stuck around because the money was
good, and it was good, but where is it now? This looks like a town of poor
people, temporary people, like a good wind might blow them all away.”

Two miners, Terry and Lyle, spent sixteen days underground
until they were found. This is a story of the survivors and how they cope and
how they don’t cope. It’s about getting out of the hole.

It is so appropriate today as 45 revitalizes the coalmines
and one has to wonder why. He certainly can’t be doing it for the miners, that
life sucks and is so tragic. He’s doing it for the suits and at the same time
changing science. 45 has no regard for nature or mankind, just the almighty
dollar. He’s a suit.

Thursday, April 20, 2017

Customer Service is a bellwether for our educational system,
like the spotted owl once was in the forests of Northwest America or the canary
in a coal mine.Where do I start? Okay,
let me ask you, What has been your experience with customer service?
Ticktockticktockticktockticktockticktockticktockticktockticktockticktockticktock…

I taught for a long time in public and private schools. The
hallmark for any good educational success was when students explained their
choices, could argue a good point, and could solve problems. I retired when
this became extinct and multiple guess tests became the norm.We don’t know why a student chose a or b or c
or d because we don’t ask. Now we have customer service folks who can’t solve
problems because it is not a choice on their menu of things they can do. Problem
solving has been thrown out the window for what appears on a computer screen as
an answer to input. They haven’t been taught how to think or problem solve,
they have been taught to memorize and choose an answer from one of four
choices. As America becomes more of a service economy, customer service must
improve. But it will only improve if we resume teaching in schools and not
continue with this mindless teach to the test form of schooling which is
starting to show its results in customer service.Now if you don’t believe me, call your
insurance company or any other business with which you interact and pay
attention to the maze you must wander in.

The experience starts when you have to get through the first
gauntlet of voice recognition or a menu of options not suitable for your call.
Asking for an agent or representative can be daunting. Voice recognition on
most sites sucks. Too many times the choice you want, speaking to a human, is
not available. Once when we called a business we got a human, now we get
automation. How does this help fix unemployment? Here’s a place where we could
add more jobs. Human jobs have been lost to automated answering machines. Sad.
Fix it 45.

The next gauntlet is getting a human. Even as we deal with a
human, we are witnessing the decline of education in America. These humans just
don’t know how to solve simple problems any more and that’s very sad. We have
to go up a chain of command to find resolution.

The third step is speaking to a supervisor. In half the
times I have gotten to this step, I have finally gotten a resolution after much
interaction. In the other half, I find a letter to the Customer Service
department is necessary. Resolution takes the customary four to six weeks.

This is how we solve problems in America today. I thought computers
were going to make our lives better. Gosh, was I naïve.

Our educational system has failed us and it is getting
worse. We have accommodated education for the evaluators and not for the
evaluatees, the students. It is easier to assess a multiple guess test than it
is to evaluate essays. That is now the problem in America, we took a short cut
and are now paying for not working hard. We have forgotten to ask why in school
and we have certainly not allowed our students to show us how except to be sure
to bubble in that little circle completely.

After that arduous customer service experience, there is
that ubiquitous survey you can do after your, “I need a drink now experience”
with customer service. Just shoot me now.

Oh, and why can’t coal miners learn a new trade like making
solar panels or wind mills of electric cars?

Monday, April 17, 2017

Bryant & May:
Strange Tide by Christopher Fowler is to London as Corby is to Ancient
History in his Athenian Mystery Series. Fowler takes us on a very erudite and
entertaining tour of British Literature, London, and the Thames through the
character of Arthur Bryant. Bryant is the member of a unique police unit in
London called the Peculiar Crimes Unit. They are headed by the very inept,
Raymond Land, mon petit debile, mon petit crapaud, Bryant is the actual and
official brain of the Unit along with his partner John May. The other members
of the Unit include Janice Longbright, Dan Banbury, Giles Kershaw, Meera
Mangeshkar, Colin Bimsley, and Fraternity DuCaine.

We witness the death
of a woman, Lynsey Dalladay, on the banks of the Thames at night. It appears she
has committed but the members of the Peculiar Crimes Unit to investigate it as
a murder. She was pregnant and her boyfriend, Freddie Cooper is a prime suspect.
One of the members of this unit, Longbright, explains their purpose best: “It’s
not our job to understand why people do the things they do, Mr. Cooper. Even
the well-intentioned ones can end up lying, and the best lies come when they’re
finally convinced they’re telling the truth. People omit truths in order to
ease their pain. We have to get the full story so that we can decide what to
do.” It sounds like we all are members of this distinguished and peculiar group
as we navigate our own lives.

I particularly love the times when Bryant is searching
through literature with the likes of a Kirkpatrick or a Darcy Sarto and scans
such tomes as Shakespeare’s First Folio or a Dickens novel for hints about the
Thames and its power over people and the City of London. Bryant’s
hallucinations about WWII and the blitzes of London are also illuminating if
not troubling to poor suffering Arthur. Even his chat with Dickens is
fantastic. Bryant is the clown to May’s straight man role. May holds the leash
or so he thinks. “Arthur Bryant was getting better at evading his keepers.”

Other elucidating moments in this novel are the interactions
with London historians like Audrey Beardsley, who would spend time relating the
more esoteric historical facts of London and the Thames. The Thames becomes a
character in this novel. “’What snakes through the heart of this investigation?’
Bryant continued, unconcerned about whether anyone was listening to him. “The
Thames. The Silent Highway. Liquid history. Think about it, the livelihoods
that depended on it, all the dock complexes, London and St Katherine’s,
Commercial, India and Millwall, the Royals and Tilbury. Between them they took
up an area of three thousand acres. Thirty miles of quays and dry docks. Think
about the toshers, the mudlarks, the scuttle-hunters, the lumpsers –‘ ‘Nope,’
said May, ‘it’s gone.’”

The main subplot involves a recent illegal immigrant, Ali.
Ali’s adventures to enter England are very sad and funny. He has special skills
and hooks up with another wanderer, Cassie. They form different teams of
entertainers to make money. Their misadventures are great sidebar stuff until
they become entangled with the law, Bryant and May and The Peculiar Crimes
Unit. Freddie Cooper, the ex boyfriend of the dead pregnant girl, Dalladay, is
an investor to the pair’s latest scheme, Life Options. It turns out Ali slept
with Freddie’s ex after they broke up. Cassie is concerned Ali may be the
father. This will complicate things, if the police get involved with the pair. For
Ali it is all about the money and he has the charms to extract it from the weak
and susceptible. He is a snake and a con man.

More bodies are found in the Thames and the Unit is trying
to find links and connections. The intrigue is kicked up a notch as we begin to
sense the power of the river, the power of it as known by the Druids, Romans,
and other inhabitants of the snake that slithers through London. The answer
always lies in the money, follow the money and the solution will always be
obvious.

The humor and dry wit have me in constant hysterics as I
often have to reread passages just for the joy of the wit and sarcasm, “mon petit lecteur”.

Thursday, April 13, 2017

Hillbilly Elegy by
J.D. Vance or is it James Donald Bowman or is it James David Hamel? It is called
a memoir, but is really fiction. As a memoir it is fake, fabricated and just
plain bullshit. This hoax sits along side other notable fraudulent memoirs like
The Education of Little Tree and James
Frey’s A Million Little Pieces that
fooled Oprah. In his introduction, which is excellent lawyer speak, Vance
supplies much evidence to the hoax and in Chapter Two again warns us of his
duplicity: “This is the story my grandparents told me, and like most family
legends it’s largely true but plays fast and loose with the details.”Vance would have done better if he followed
Tracy Chevalier’s model, At The Edge of the
Orchard.

I have always been told ignorance of the law is not an
excuse. So, too, “Willful Ignorance” is not a defense against ignorance: “Their
paper (NYTimes) suggests that Hillbillies
learn from an early age to deal with uncomfortable truths by avoiding them, or
by pretending better truths exist.” Isn’t this the same crap we hear from
Conway about Spicer’s “Alternative Facts”?

If this is real, then Hillbillies are just dumb sons of
bitches who deserve their crappy lot in life because they are just too ignorant
to know any better. And for Vance to be defending this stupidity is even more
insulting to us. This is the story of people who literally cut off their nose
to spite their face. They are admittedly “Willfully Ignorant” and that just
isn’t a defense or justification for their ignorance and harmful actions. Their
lives do have an impact on ours and that is wrong, just wrong. They are not
good Americans because that is not what our Founding Fathers wanted from the
people, “Willful Ignorance.”

“Papaw’s distant cousin – also Jim Vance – married into the
Hatfield family and joined a group of former Confederate soldiers and
sympathizers called the Wildcats. Cousin Jim murdered former Union soldier Asa
Harmon McCoy, he kicked off one of the most famous family feuds in American
history.” Add to this tall tale the one about a Tilden killing a rival on
Election Day and we do have some whoppers here. “As Mamaw used to say, you can
take the boy out of Kentucky, but you can’t take Kentucky out of the boy.” (Page
25)

“Jimmy (author’s uncle), Mamaw would tell me later, could
sit up at two weeks, walk at four months, speak in complete sentences just
after his first birthday, and read classic novels by age three (“A slight
exaggeration,” my uncle later admitted.)” One bullshit story follows the next.
This memoir reeks like a cow barn. It is however an entertaining novel,
maudlin, but entertaining with its clichés while an adult romanticizes about
his youth in awe and full of admiration that it might have actually been this
way. Delusional!

I love the stories of the bully in school, fighting his
sister’s boyfriend, and Mamaw’s advice on fighting. Perhaps the best religious
joke I’ve heard and reflective of this book involves a man who in his house
during a flood. As the waters rise a car comes by to offer escape and he
declines saying ‘God will take care of me.’ He responds the same way when the
first floor floods and a boat comes by and when he is on the roof and a
helicopter comes by. Eventually he calls to God and wonders why he hasn’t cared
for him. God replies, ‘I sent a car, a boat, and a helicopter. Your death is
your own fault.’ God helps those who help themselves.” Of course that is the
greater truth and further evidence to “Willful Ignorance.” Another deception or
lie is about actual church going. “Despite its reputation, Appalachia has far
lower church attendance than the Midwest, and is much lower in the South. This
pattern of deception has to do with cultural pressure.” So lying and deception
are cultural traits and mores. This helps explain the deception of this memoir,
this hoax that at best could be a novel.

One dramatic moment from his life is followed with another.
In one he forgets what he says to his mom that causes her to drive a hundred
miles an hour promising to kill them both before he flies out of the car after
she stops it and he runs through fields to a house with a fat woman in her pool
demanding she call his Mamaw cause his mom is going to kill him. He forgot what
he said? His mother is arrested after the woman called 911. Then after his
Papaw died on a Tuesday he heard a Lynyrd Skynyrd song “Tuesday’s Gone.” This
he remembers. And yet the episodes from any of his school days he remembers are
those filled with books about social justice, The Truly Disadvantaged and Losing
Ground, that are politically rooted to help him with his political agenda
as supplied by his Mamaw’s rants, very convenient. Heck, school days are those days
that dominate our lives forever when we are young and have nightmares about in
our middle age. A memoir without school days is mighty fishy. How does he know
such intimate things about his Mamaw like the time she took those Beaver Hunts magazines? As I said a fair
novel, but hardly a memoir, mostly fiction built on a truth or two as any good
novel is.

What would any good memoir be without 9/11 and a stint in
the Marines? Well we get them both in this pile of bullshit. Be sure to tug at
the heartstrings and go patriotic whenever the narrative looses momentum and
you need to further the political agenda. I found his college and Law school a
bit much. Yes, it is easily documented but college in less then two years,
Yikes. All of this is just modest bullshit. “Just give me my diploma; I don’t
need to shake the college president’s hand.” What bullshit.

At this point I was almost sucked in by this lawyer/con
artist because I, too, found the military a saving grace for me. The military
changed my life and allowed me to also go through college and post grad work
successfully after a very lackluster high school lack of education. But then it
hit me, this guy is a lawyer and like all good lawyers he can con any jury, and
Vance has done just that, conned us with this bullshit.

What is it he isn’t telling us? What is this lawyer/con
artist not saying? The one and most important aspect of Hillbilly culture that
was lacking from this fake not authentic memoir was the absence of any
discussion of incest, the cornerstone of Hillbilly culture. “Why did the
Hillbilly go to the family reunion? To find a wife.” Incest is such a cultural
norm in Hillbilly culture, sociologists and others study it on a regular basis
and it has to be one of the main reasons and shames Hillbillies keep everything
in the family and keep to themselves. It is what separates Hillbillies from the
rest of us humans. That is why they are so different from us. There may be
hints of incest in Mamaw’s secrets or mom’s desperate and irrational behavior
with the flurry of men in her lives or why his dad escaped and became a born
again or his uncle who escaped. Again I must remind myself a lawyer is weaving
this tale and he spins a good yarn, but he has omitted a most crucial part of
his proud Hillbilly existence and that is the scourge of Hillbilly culture, the
shameful act of incest.

I know that Abraham Lincoln’s father left the Hingham
Lincoln clan for Kentucky and Abraham rose from that ash heap to be labeled
“Honest Abe” but Mr. Vance you didn’t rise high enough as you became a con man
just like 45 who conned his way into the WH. White trash is so appropriate. Being
a Hillbilly just ain’t no excuse for your down right plain “Willful Ignorance”
and incestuous ways to expect forgiveness let alone understanding Mr. Vance or
whatever your name is. It’s against God’s will. This is bullshit you Hillbilly son
of a bitch. You have tried to con us and have succeeded in some circles. Remember
there are two kinds of terminators, the good ones and the bad ones and there
ain’t no good con men.

Perhaps a good discussion of education can come from this
reading. I agree that education reform shouldn’t begin at high school but in
Pre School and in the lower grades. Research informs us of that. Invest lots
and lots of military kind of money in early school and we would do well.
Involve the community: the previously employed, grandparents, high school
students, parents and provide a community of learners in every community and
the rest will fall into place because then we will have created a culture of
learning. This is how you make America great again by making it smart. It’s all
about education stupid.

Vance may have found the Author’s Note to Moonglow by Michael Chabon inspiring and
appropriate. “In preparing this memoir, I have stuck to facts except when facts
refused to conform with memory, narrative purpose, or the truth as I prefer to
understand it. Wherever liberties have been taken with names, dates, places,
events, and conversations, or with the identities, motivations, and interrelationships
of family members and historical personages, the reader is assured that they
have been taken with due abandon.”

Monday, April 10, 2017

The Most Dangerous
Place On Earth by Lindsey Lee Johnson is about the Internet and middle and
high school. This combo makes for an interesting story and read. The schools
are in the prestigious and wealthy community of Mill Valley on the outskirts of
Sausalito across the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco. I don’t have a
Facebook or Twitter account for a reason. I used to have a cell phone blocker
in my classroom for a reason. I created CyberEnglish for a reason. This novel
verifies to me why my reasons make even more sense now than ever. This is a
scary novel because it reiterates the idea that the inmates are running the
schools. It reminds me of that classic movie with Alan Bates in the King of Hearts. A new teacher, Molly
Nichols, makes all the classic first year teacher mistakes and some. The result
is that she has her wings clipped severely along the lines of Randle Patrick
McMurphy in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s
Nest. Again one has to ask the question why are we still teaching the way
we were taught? Why do the five rows of six desks with the teacher desk front
and center still exist? With this configuration I’d add a video cam to my
teaching arsenal so I can video tape the class especially when my back is
turned so I could provide proof to the overbearing parents and explain the ugly
truths to my students. As Molly suggests, teachers may be glorified
babysitters, which rankles her colleagues. It shouldn’t because that is what
teachers are, “Glorified Babysitters.” I found that truth liberating as I
proceeded in the classroom for my pleasure and joy and if the students wish to
share in that joy, so be it. They do have the right to fail after all and who
am I to infringe upon their rights. As I taught I just made sure no student
infringed on any other student’s rights so we had a pleasant environment. It
was not my job to teach them, it was their job to learn. I was to provide the
safe environment and the data for them to learn, their choice, not mine. That
is why I loved CyberEnglish so much and the drama class I taught.

Reading this book was one of the best I have read about the
actual practice of teaching in a novel and I had fun with it. It also
reiterated for me why I retired and am so happy for that decision since the
current educational policies are so confused and misguided. Making America
Smart Again is going to be an uphill battle in a war we may not win considering
our current politics and leadership. When so many Americans consider “Willful
Ignorance” a virtue, we could be looking at the fall of the American Empire.

Thursday, April 6, 2017

The Ionia Sanction
by Gary Corby is a rough read. In rough I mean savage in its description of the
very common practice of anal impalement as a form of execution, which was
replaced by crucifixion. In addition because Nico, our Athenian PI or agent who
works for Pericles, finds himself in Ionia, specifically Ephesus and Magnesia,
the western coast of today’s Turkey, he witnesses and is almost subject to this
barbaric form of execution. They have much different habits than their Greek
counterparts, so it is an education for Nico as much as it may be for us. The
practices of the ancients were horrendous and cruel. Sexual practice in Ionia is
as unbridled as was in Greece, but there seems to be more incestuous
relationships in Ionia than in Greece. Diotima has moved to Magnesia and is one
reason Nico takes the assignment for Pericles. Women’s desire to have Nico has
helped Diotima figure out that she wants Nico and breaks her vows to marry him
in a rather rushed marriage, since they both believe they will die.

Socrates, Nico’s younger brother, provides some humor as he
pretends to be Nico’s slave for a night so he can go to his first and certainly
not last symposium. He is a hit and the lead philosopher of the time, thinking
Socrates is Nico’s slave, proposes to buy Socrates. The ensuing action with
their dad is very funny. But then what older brother might not want to sell his
younger brother? Another very interesting part is Nico’s interaction with
Themistocles, who is the leader of Magnesia and a brilliant man, similar to a
Winston Churchill in cunning, politics, and genius. Nico learns more from him
about politics than he does from Pericles. Much is made of loyalty in this
novel. Hector is the model of loyalty for the Greeks whereas; Themistocles is
for the Persians and other non-Greeks. The Greek of course consider the state
to be the first loyalty and non-Greeks start with self, then family, then
state. The stories of different family members in this novel provide unique and
clever commentary for all of us to chew on and ruminate over. The culmination
of the wedding for Nico and Diotima is important as it lifts this tension between
the two and allows for the two to work together more fruitfully.

EST

About Me

I retired in Feb 2012 after teaching English since 1974 in private and public schools. I'm a father of three. I have twin granddaughters and a grandson. I have two younger sisters. I live in Woodstock, GA and I travel in a Scamp.
ted.nellen@gmail.com